Quotes from Todd May

Different development itself runs the threat of making life shapeless.

To live in the moment and in the future at the same time would seem to me to be the trick.

Love is not a promissory note.

One of the things that's crucial to me about love is that it has to be in the moment.

I would like to make a bold claim right here at the outset: the fact that we die is the most important fact about us. There is nothing that has more weight in our lives.

The fact that we die is what makes what we do and who we do it with matter.

I am like a wave on the sea. While the wave rises I appear to have some independent existence. However, I am just a movement of the sea, and my death is nothing but a crashing of water into water. My truth is that I am of the sea, and as a wave I appear independent of it only for a moment.

For a human life to be meaningful, it must be one in which I am not a spectator but a real participant, and a participant in something that matters to me. [...] For my life to be meaningful, those projects have to feel like _my_ projects: not in the sense that I own them, but more in the sense that they own me, that they have captured my focus.

My children will suffer in ways I fear I can foresee but am hopeless to prevent.

for Aristotle contemplation is the highest good that a life can achieve. It is the good he associates with the gods.

We are all born to no point, live out our days as best we can, and are then dissolved into the earth.

In 1998, the New York Times reported that "in the [annual UCLA] survey taken at the start of the fall semester, 74.9 percent of freshmen chose being well off as an essential goal and 40.8 percent chose developing a philosophy. In 1968, the numbers were reversed, with 40.8 percent selecting financial security and 82.5 percent citing the importance of developing a philosophy."4

We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.

Is there some reason for my being here except to live out my allotted time, to burn my days alongside others who are, in turn, burning theirs?

The best way to treat the watch, then, is to wear it.

The absurd itself is something very precise. It is the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the universe to yield it to us.

narrative therapy says that who we are is largely a product of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. [...] In other words, our narratives about ourselves don't merely reflect who we are: they help produce who we are.

Thomas Kuhn, who once said that he came to realize that he did not understand a thinker until he could see the world through that thinker's eyes.